by Philip Reeve
He tried the door again and it swung open. The room behind it was lit by the glow of various antiquated screens and dials. He scanned it quickly and could not see Nova. He was about to turn away when her voice came out of the shadows.
“Zen!”
He was so shocked when he saw what they had done to her that he dropped the waterblade. It fell feather-slow in the low gravity, but it hit the tiled floor with a sound like a bomb going off. “Guardians!” he said, adding to the din.
Nova — or what was left of Nova — was smiling at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was so pleased to see you that I forgot I’ve lost a bit of weight. But I’m all right, mostly. The rest of me is in another room, downstairs…”
“Guardians!” said Zen again. He didn’t even want to look at her, bodiless like that, held up by metal clamps, all kinds of wires and cables trailing from her neck. But he made himself reach across the table to her and start to fumble the clamps open. It was harder than he’d thought; they didn’t work the way he had expected. He was still cursing and fiddling with them when the Damask Rose said suddenly in his headset, “Oh, bother! They’re on to us! The whole burrow is swarming…”
At almost the same instant he heard harsh Kraitt voices in the tunnels, and only an instant later a Kraitt kicked the door open and stared in at him.
Zen pulled his gun out and pointed it at the ugly lizard face. He hadn’t imagined he’d have any problems shooting Kraitt — it was them or him; it should feel no different from the time he had shot that gene-teched monster in the Noon reserve on Jangala. But the fact that it was wearing clothes, an intelligent being rather than just an animal, made it hard to kill. He stood there with the gun outstretched, staring at the Kraitt while it stared back at him for what might have been a whole, slow second. Then it reached behind its back and drew a knife that looked like a steel talon.
“The little one told the truth,” it shouted. “The prey is here!”
Just then, with a deafening bang, the roof caved in.
Big chunks of rubble came thumping down, smashing machinery, driving the shocked Kraitt backward. Something else came down too, dropping through the fresh, smoking hole overhead, hitting the floor with a bony sound and then rising on eight long legs. At first, confused, Zen thought it was another of the Rose’s spiders. But it was too chunky, too spiny, too alien-looking — a gigantic spider crab, its shell stenciled with strange hieroglyphics. A Neem. Stabbing light flared from something it clutched in its spindly manipulator arms and a roar filled the ruined room. The Kraitt in the doorway walked shakily backward and fell. The spider-crab thing stepped over his body and out into the tunnel. It fired its gun again, and there were shrieks and scrambling, slithering noises and then silence and slow smoke billowing like a sheet of gossamer.
The Neem swung its spiky body toward Zen. On its front was painted a yellow smiley face. “Always bring a gun to a knife fight, Zen Starling,” it said, in a rustling, oddly familiar voice, and in the language of the Network Empire. “It saves so much time.”
Zen let out some of the breath he’d been holding in since the ceiling came down. It made a kind of whimpery noise.
The Neem came back into the room, through the smoke. “Don’t you recognize me, Zen?” it said. “It’s me! It’s your old friend Uncle Bugs!”
*
Chandni had been keeping her options open. The Empress might have let herself be taken in by Zen Starling and his crazy plan, but Chandni hadn’t liked it from the start, and when she saw the Kraitt leader and realized how smart and how ruthless she was, she knew a two-bit thief like Zen could never hope to outwit her.
It felt good, in a way, to finally find something that she understood among these weird new worlds. Because Chandni had known people like the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss before. Ramon Gul, for whom she had worked in Ayaguz, had wielded the same kind of power. The members of the Deep Six Crew had obeyed him in the same way the Kraitt obeyed this lizard-lady. You either made yourself useful to people like that or they made you their prey; there was no other way. They were never taken down by anyone smaller than them. Ramon Gul had controlled half the hulls of Ayaguz by the time the Lee family finally got tired of him and sent in their CoMa. And as far as Chandni could tell, none of the cuddly critters who ran this Web of Worlds was looking for a fight with the Tzeld Gekh.
Which meant the only way to save her own skin, and the Empress’s, was to switch sides, and let Zen Starling drop.
So she grabbed Threnody by the shoulders and forced her down on her knees in front of the furious Kraitt, and knelt beside her, shouting, “We’re giving Zen Starling to you as a sign of respect, Tzeld Gekh Karneiss. We’ve brought you his train too; it’s yours…”
And the Gekh didn’t hack off her head with that razor-blade tail, which seemed promising. But then the room kind of shivered, and when Chandni looked up there was a thin mist making halos around the lights, a mist made of dust; she could taste it, bland and gritty in her mouth. The room jerked again, and she heard the explosion this time, a big, dull woof echoing through the burrow’s rock. Then clattering noises that had to be gunfire, and she realized that her hunch had been wrong and her timing terrible, because someone wanted a fight with the Kraitt after all.
“It’s nothing to do with us, Your Honor,” she said desperately, but nobody heard, because at that point a couple of red spider crabs the size of patio tables barged in and started shooting everything.
30
For a long moment Zen just stood there. Uncle Bugs was a Hive Monk: a million bugs sharing a consciousness and clinging to a vaguely human-shaped skeleton that they’d built for themselves out of junk. The last time Zen saw them, they were being scattered back into a mindless swarm in Desdemor. How could Uncle Bugs have been reborn in the form of a trigger-happy Neem here on the Shards?
But these and other questions would have to wait until the next exciting episode, he realized, because the tunnels were filling again with the sound of angry Kraitt, and they were coming closer.
“You are here to rescue Miss Nova, yes?” said the Neem. “We will help you, just like you helped us, Zen Starling, when you brought us to the Insect Lines.”
Zen gawked at it. Back home, Hive Monks rode the K-bahn endlessly, searching for the mystical Insect Lines. Zen had persuaded Uncle Bugs to help him for a while by promising to show them how to get there, but he had never believed the Insect Lines were anything but a Hive Monk myth. Unless…
“The Nestworlds of the Neem!” the Neem explained. “They are what we all were dreaming of, when we were Hive Monks, in the Network Empire. The Insect Lines are real, and they are here, and you brought us to them. Now we thank you!”
Zen thought of the Monk bug that had fluttered in his face the day the Damask Rose arrived on Yaarm. Nova had sold that to some Herastec, who had said that they would sell it to the Neem. The Neem must have bred from it, and bred enough to fill this crab-suit with a whole new hive that still remembered being Uncle B.
“Bring Miss Nova,” ordered the Neem. “We have not much time.”
“But it’s just her head,” said Zen, stuffing his gun away and going back to the business of unfastening Nova’s head from its various power and fluid feeds.
“The rest of me is in one of the other rooms,” said Nova.
“We have not much time,” said the Neem again. “Bring her head. The Neem are very skilled. We can make her a new body, with a superior number of legs.”
Zen fumbled with the clamps, taking the weight of Nova’s head in his hands as they finally released their grip. There were quick, nasty sprays of fluid as he used the waterblade to sever trailing cables. “Damask Rose,” he shouted as he worked, “can you tell where Nova’s body is?”
“I’m sorry—” said the Rose.
The Ghost Wolf cut in on the same channel. “I think I’m picking up a signal from a Motorik’s spinal sub-brain. It�
�s another level below you, here…”
A new map pinged into Zen’s headset view. He thanked the trains, picked up Nova’s head, and ran out into the corridor and then left. The Neem that said it was Uncle Bugs galloped after him with Kraitt bullets spanging off its armored shell, shouting, “No! You must come with me, Zen Starling! This is an order from the Hard Diplomacy Office of the Nestworld Zzr’zrrt…”
Zen reached what he thought was the door of the second room. While he was slicing through the lock, a fresh explosion made the floor hop. An alarm started bellowing, rolling its echoes away down the tunnels. The door came open and the new room was as big as the first and just as full of screens, ducts, primitive computers. On a low table in the middle of it all lay Nova’s body. “Oh!” said Nova, seeing it from the corner of her eye, her face pressed against the front of Zen’s Kraitt jacket.
The Kraitt had cut her open, harvesting battery packs and backup memory devices. They had taken her left arm off at the elbow, her right leg at the knee. She would have wept at all the damage, except that she had been removed from her water supply and had no tears to weep with. When she contacted her body’s sub-brain, damage warnings flashed red and amber in her mind.
A screech of gunfire, very close. Zen yelped and spun around, but the Kraitt who came through the doorway was dead already, falling. Behind it came another Neem, smaller than Uncle Bugs and dark red. It swept its smoking gun around the chamber and said something in a rustling, unknown language. Uncle Bugs picked up Nova’s body, cut a few cables that had been attached to her, and scuttled to the far end of the chamber. There was another door there. The new Neem pulled something from a cargo-pod on the leg of its suit and slapped it against the lock.
“Watch out!” said Uncle Bugs, swinging his painted smiley face in Zen’s direction. “Those things explode! The Neem are hard core.”
Zen turned his back to it and shielded Nova’s head with his body and his arms. A flash lit up the room. When he looked again the door was falling outward, tugging a white scarf of smoke out into the tunnel beyond. The red Neem went over it and out into darkness, and Uncle Bugs followed with Nova’s body clutched under his own.
Then they were moving through passageways, the floors sloping upward, that deep klaxon note sounding and resounding like a badly tuned cello. Open air, hot desert dusk, tall cacti standing sentry, and the chimneys and wind towers of the city rising black against a sky full of tumbling, sunlit mountains. Over the horizon a shining shape was rising, spilling rainbows. It was the Sea of Kharne, a globe of water the size of a moon, and it was near enough that Zen could see the sails of a Kraitt fishing fleet flaring white in the light that came up through the waves beneath them.
He stood and stared at it, cradling Nova’s head. He wondered what had become of Threnody and Chandni Hansa and the truck, and how he was supposed to get back to the train, and whether it would still be there when he did. And then the Neem beside him said, “They come!” and something that was not the truck arrived with a roar and a cloud of dust. As far as he could tell through the dust and the dark, it was a hovercraft, on which a few more Neem were clustered, some at the controls of hefty weapons.
“Agents from the Hard Diplomacy Office!” explained Uncle Bugs. “You are lucky — they have been watching the Gekh. When we saw you and your friends enter, we decided to move against her…”
Zen scrambled after him onto the hovercraft. Uncle Bugs dumped Nova’s body gracelessly on the greasy deck, and the craft was moving, powering across stony fields. Above the whir of its engines Zen thought he caught another sound. He looked back and glimpsed for half a second a figure running. “Stop!” he yelled. “Go back! It’s Threnody!”
Or had it been Chandni? All he’d seen was a running shape, outlined for a moment against the airborne sea. Had it even been human?
Uncle Bugs and his friends seemed to be wondering the same thing; there was a lot of rustly debate going on up near the little turret where the Neem pilot stood. But then the craft swerved around and shot back the way it had come, and out of the darkness came Threnody, shouting, “Help! Zen! Don’t leave me!”
A Neem dragged her aboard. The craft did another sharp turn, throwing another fan of dust into the Shards’ sky, and went shrieking on its way.
“Where’s Chandni?” Zen yelled, over the noise.
“Shebetrayed us!” Threnody gasped, sobbing for breath, eyes full of dust and tears. “And then — these things, these horrible things came — and the Damask Rose said they were on our side…”
“They’re Hive Monks,” said Nova. “I can hear them all rustling around inside those armored crab-suits. Millions of them. The Neem are Hive Monks, though I’m not sure how…”
Threnody had not noticed the severed head till now. It would have been an unnerving sight, even if it had not been talking to her. She wasn’t sure how to react. She looked at Zen again and said, “Chandni’s still back there. She said we’d be better off with the Kraitt… Do all your plans end up like this?”
“Pretty much,” said Nova.
From somewhere behind came a huge, dull boom. A flower of fire clambered into the sky above the city, carrying with it quite large pieces of the Gekh’s villa, which fell back slowly to the ground, trailing smoke. The hovercraft sped toward the railway. The Damask Rose and the Ghost Wolf were already moving, pulling out from behind the Railmaker ruins. Bright flicks of gunfire came from the station buildings, but Zen felt confident that the trains’ shielding could deflect whatever crude weapons the Kraitt owned. And a moment later the insectile morvah of the Neem came tearing out behind the Ghost Wolf, and a pulse of light ripped from its rear car and washed the glass towers in fire and scattered pieces of glowing weed away into the night.
The Neem steered their hovercraft next to the line, matching their speed to the speed of their train. The side of a freight container fell open, forming a ramp, and the craft swerved and went sideways up it. The ramp closed again, and the Neem chittered urgently to one another in the dark inside. Once something hit the outside of the container, as if someone outside were firing heavy weapons at it. Then the engine sound changed as it entered a tunnel, and there was the soft un-bang of a passing K-gate.
The Neem relaxed. Their bodies sank lower. They detached their weapons and stowed them in lockers or in holsters clipped to their long legs. In the blood-red light inside the container they looked like a cluster of killer crabs. Their spiny shadows slid over Nova’s headless body, propped in a corner like the carcass of their latest victim.
Zen sat awkwardly watching, with Nova’s head on his lap as if it were a bag or something. He had imagined finding Nova alive, and he had been afraid of finding her dead, but he had not prepared himself for finding her in pieces. He’d been wondering a lot about what made someone human, and he had been ready to believe Nova when she said she was. But it seemed to him now that maybe an important part of being human was that you had just one life, and that when someone took you apart you died. Or, at least, you minded. So thinking of her as a human being wasn’t going to work anymore. He had to accept that she was something very different, and that he still loved her anyway.
*
The roof of the Tzeld Gekh’s compound had been blasted clean off by the bombs the insect commandos had left behind. When morning came, the brass sun shone down into the crater that had been her audience chamber, where it woke Chandni, lying bruised among the rubble.
She scrambled out from under the dead Kraitt whose body had shielded her from the blast. She tried her headset. “Ghost Wolf? Damask Rose?” No answer. “Threnody?”
There was nothing. The Empress and the rest were either dead or they had escaped. It was probably for the best, she thought. They probably wouldn’t want to hear from Chandni anyway.
She felt bitterly sad at losing Threnody, and angry at herself for caring, but mostly she just felt angry at those giant crab things for ruining
her moment. That was the way it always went, though: you took your chances and you rode your luck, and sooner or later things went bad and you found yourself heading back into the freezers.
Except there weren’t any freezers here. In fact, as the sun rose higher, it was starting to grow unpleasantly warm.
A shadow fell over her. She squinted up into the battered, blood-caked face of the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss. The metal-sheathed tip of the Kraitt matriarch’s tail pressed against the underneath of Chandni’s chin, forcing her head back.
“You didn’t tell me that your friends were allied with the Neem,” said the Tzeld Gekh.
“They aren’t,” said Chandni. “I mean, I didn’t know…”
The Tzeld Gekh hissed, long and low, and her one remaining eye blazed with dinosaur fury.
31
The next world was empty: a plain of shining stone beneath an amber sky. The atmosphere was just breathable enough for Zen and Threnody to get off the Neem train and back onto their own. Zen carried Nova’s head, and Uncle Bugs and one of his new friends came with them, carrying Nova’s body. When they stepped into the state car of the Damask Rose, the interface of Mordaunt 90 hugged them all, even the spiky Neem. “I was so worried about you,” he said. “And Chandni? Where is Chandni?”
“She didn’t make it,” said Threnody.
“She is dead?” His face crumpled. He hated the idea of people dying.
“I think so,” said Threnody.
“She double-crossed us,” said Zen, flinging himself down in his favorite seat before Threnody could take it. “She tried to sell us out to the Kraitt. Why would she do that?”